My old friend Jonathan Kay was unable to resist some snide and bitchy Tweeting when CRTV dumped me two months ago, so I can't deny the malicious old queen in me would quite enjoy reciprocating now that he's out as editor of Canada's allegedly prestigious magazine The Walrus. But, alas, my better angels are with Sheila Gunn Reid on this one:
While I should be enjoying the left eating themselves, I think every time the shutuppery bullies win is a bad thing.
Agreed. And the shutuppery is accelerating: It's just claimed its second Canadian magazine editor in a week - over "cultural appropriation", which like everything else these days started off as some obscure fetish only plonking humorless fringe Marxists cared about and then suddenly, in nothing flat, reared up like the shark in Jaws and started chewing up everyone on the beach. The Great Australian Wag Tim Blair explains what happened:
Earlier this month... the imaginatively-titled journal Write [published by the Writers' Union of Canada] presented an extremely helpful guide to our future under politically-correct rule.
The trouble began when Hal Niedzviecki, editor of [Write, the magazine, wrote a mild and cogently-argued opinion piece. In it, Niedzviecki revealed his personal concerns about the red-hot PC issue of cultural appropriation.
Basically, Niedzviecki cares very little for it.
"In my opinion, anyone, anywhere, should be encouraged to imagine other peoples, other cultures, other identities," he wrote.
"I'd go so far as to say there should even be an award for doing so – the Appropriation Prize for best book by an author who writes about people who aren't even remotely like her or him."
But as they advise in the Creative Writing courses: Write what you know - or else. Mr Niedzviecki's fellow Writers' Union of Canada official unionized writers didn't care for the cut of his appropriative jib. Alicia Elliott, a graduate of York University's Creative Writing program and former winner of Enbridge's Aboriginal Writing Challenge, said she was "literally shaking" after reading his piece. The last time I was "literally shaking" was when I overdid it in the gas-sniffing round of the Aboriginal Cultural Appropriation Awards ...whoops, you can't say that, can you?
So, as Tim Blair puts it, Hal Niedzviecki found himself "culturally appropriated right out of a job".
Then Jonathan Kay wrote a column suggesting that perhaps we need to kinda sorta have a debate on cultural appropriation before it all gets out of hand - and he too found himself culturally appropriated right out of a job. When an extremist hatemonger like Kay calls for a debate, all reasonable moderate people should call for him to be fired, and destroyed, and hounded from public life.
These aren't oil-patch newsletters or cookery magazines that find themselves sideswiped after carelessly dabbling in an issue that's of no particular relevance to them and decide to cut their losses before it leads to advertiser boycotts and falling stock prices. Both magazines pride themselves in being dedicated to the craft of writing and were addressing the central question of what it is a writer is free to write about. To me the only answer to that is: Everything. To Messrs Kay and Niedzviecki's bosses the answer is something far more mean and shriveled.
As the bestselling novelist Lionel Shriver put it when I interviewed her on this subject a couple of months back:
I have so little time for the concept of cultural appropriation, meaning that, as it applies to my occupation, you don't have the right to assume that you know what it's like to be someone other than yourself. Which is what fiction writers do.
Exactly so. As I said to Lionel:
Rudyard Kipling can write Indian and English characters, and Salman Rushdie can write Indian and English characters, and may the best man win.
But even to have to point that out is a defeat: As we agreed, the minute you have to state something so butt-numbingly obvious as that Shakespeare wasn't a Prince of Denmark or a Moor of Venice, you've lost. We've all lost. We're in a mad world, where it seems entirely normal for literary magazines to rule on what fictional characters a novelist is permitted to conceive.
Unlike the two Canadian editors, Lionel Shriver didn't go the perhaps-we-ought-to-have-a-debate route. She decided to throw the whole cultural-appropriation thing back in the appropriators' faces and appeared on stage wearing a sombrero. Naturally the organizers of the so-called "literary festival" stampeded to dissociate themselves, and most of the literary bigfeet could muster no more than tepid and equivocal support. Lionel is nobody's idea of a right-wing loon, but she recognizes, in a way that Kay and Niedzviecki did not, that you can't tiptoe up to this issue and meet the Appropriation mutaween halfway. "Screw off, you totalitarian tossers" is, in fact, the only reasonable response:
As I said, Lionel is nobody's idea of a hardcore right-winger like yours truly, but she's discovering that, when you need 'em, the respectable writers like, say, Francine Prose are never quite there for you. Jonathan Kay is likewise no right-winger, certainly not compared to his splendid mum Barbara. If memory serves, Jonathan has introduced me on stage in Toronto on two occasions, for both of which he volunteered his services. But more recently he has been on a bit of a political odyssey - to the point where he helped Justin Trudeau "write" his memoir. (It's not cultural appropriation if a francophone Liberal, or presumably a Pushtun warlord or a Bhutanese yakherd, pays an anonymous ghost-writer to pretend to be him.)
Over here on the far right, I'm always happy to have people meet me halfway. Indeed, at the moment, on everything that matters - trade, war, health care - there's very little agreement over anything on the American right. But on the left it's different. Increasingly, their view is that the great questions have been settled, there's only one correct answer, and you have to get all of them right - because an 80 per cent ally is, to the new mutaween, a 20 per cent enemy, as Niedzviecki and Kay have discovered.
As it happens, there's one almighty cultural appropriation going on right now. Indeed, it's a heist. The United Kingdom has become the acid-attack capital of the world. Female genital mutilation is practiced in "medical" clinics from Michigan to Melbourne. The taharrush has spread to Cologne and other Central European cities. Ritual beheading has come to French Catholic churches and upstate New York. And if you protest, "Look, I totally deplore all this cultural appropriation. I think it's outrageous that Britain and America and Australia and Europe are culturally appropriating acid attacks and FGM and beheading and honor killings", you're told, "No, no. That's diversity. It's vibrant. What's not to enjoy? It's a beautiful mélange - just like this new Homeland Security proposal to ban laptops from cabin baggage on translatlantic flights, because a western cultural artifact is being appropriated and weaponized in the cause of eastern jihadism. What a rich cultural co-mingling..."
Jonathan Kay thinks I'm a bit boorish and vulgar when I go on about such things. So I was hoping someone would maybe write a novel or make a film about it.
But that novel can never be written - because, under Writers' Union of Canada logic, only a Muslim could write it. Because in a vibrant diverse world, the one place that can't be diverse and vibrant is a work of art.
There's no internal consistency, no logic, no philosophical principle here. Only - as two Canadian editors learned last week - the brute power of a totalitarian left ever more inimical to the only diversity that matters: diversity of thought, diversity of expression.
Those who wish to reduce art to identity-group propaganda are deadly serious, and we could use a few more Lionel Shrivers. It's time we all donned sombreros and saddled up our donkeys to head these guys off at the pass.
~If you're a Founding Member of The Mark Steyn Club, feel free to hit the comments section below - or shoot Mark a tough question during his live Q&A session this Wednesday - 4pm Eastern, 1pm Pacific, 9pm London, 10pm on the Continent, and some ungodly hour on Thursday morning Down Under.
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There is no honor among thieves -- on the Right as well as on the Left. While the Left has long enjoyed eating their own, I find it discomforting to see what the Right has begun to do to people who would cost them . . . anything. One of the most sickening aspects of watching the Reagan funeral was listening to "Republican thinkers" laud him when they'd been among the first to mock the old guy in 1980 and did not get on board until his ideas showed signs of success. So identity-group muck extends into the Right Way of thinking now too.
The valiant attempt is not to be in the middle (gah!) but to assess the individual, not the identity badge, worn or unworn. It's a messy mess, thinking in print. For some, Doctrine rules, for others, Dollars. I personally prefer the bolero hat! And a mustang!
I guess, if non-appropriating prevails, all we'll be able to write about is I, or various dialectical versions of such...Ah, Iyee, m', depending on our personal origins and experiences. How BORING!
And then they'll make narcissism a crime: Being Selfish!
Lord, help us!!!
Mikey.
ps, wadabout your column on "MY Biggest Mistakes"? M.
Mark, you might consider the case of the vicious art world brouhaha over famed artist Dana Schutz' use of the iconic image of Emmet Till's body in her painting displayed at the recent Whitney Biennial.
This deeply divided the art world, with most siding with the calls to self-censor: if you're white, better not to paint about black people's experience and especially their victimization. Schutz was quite taken by surprise by the firestorm of condemnation and calls for her painting to be destroyed.
In the larger cultural sphere Whoopie Goldberg smartly defended Schultz' right to paint about Till (on The View), castigating those crying cultural appropriation and pithily stating that 'In the larger fight, we all need each other' or something to that effect.
We are living in what Mark succinctly defined as 'a sort of madness' .. wherever one looks the Left is flipping every reliable value of Western enlightenment .. nothing remains sacred. Perhaps, just perhaps, we needed this degree of raw, prodding savagery, at its' hysterical pitch, to grasp our cutlasses. What Genghis Khan would have given for social media !
I thought literary theory separated the biological author from his text, which takes on an entirely separate life out in reader land...so might not the living author be culturally appropriating himself when creating a written text? Now at least I know why I never wrote that damn novel - I was too inherently decent to commit such an exploitative act.
Bravo, Mr. Steyn. I'm very pleased to see you've provided lots of new content on this website and made a subscription model that works for everyone. I for one think the world is not the same without the pithy Steyn-isms so I was happy to subscribe.
And, if anyone wants in on a sombrero supply startup please hit me up. I'm in Phoenix so we have a replete supply and they are dirt cheap. And plenty of tacos and cervezas while we discuss our business model :)
So, has "Porgy and Bess" been given the damnatio memoriae treatment yet? And if not, why not? It's not enough that the cast be populated with black actors and singers; what can be done about the fact that the entire thing was written by a white Southerner and a Jewish New Yorker? And yet it was performed on Broadway within the last 5 years!
My question is, even if we grant the malcontents' premise, and Gershwin appropriated, faked or stole black American stories and musical themes, where are all the *authentic* Porgy and Besses now? Gershwin's opera is 80 years old. Where are all the naturally superior operatic expressions of black American life? If it weren't for Gershwin, there wouldn't BE any black presence in highbrow culture, except among performers. (Maybe 'Treemonisha' would figure in there, but it's practically unknown.)
"Cultural appropriation" is nothing more than culture, all societies have done it since the dawn of man.
This has nothing really to do with art or culture. Social justice showoffs wring their hands and howl when they see success outside a so-called disadvantaged group, and less success within that group. They wish that it was an aboriginal/indian/first nations/whatever person making money and getting exposure for indigenous-looking art. The old way was to hand out grants and other free money and try to fix the problem outside natural market forces or free choice (of art creator or art buyer). That has been tried for decades and did not work. Now we have to drag down "privileged" people to try and solve some sort of problem of inequality of result. To cower away in fear of the outrage industry is absolutely wimpy on the part of Kay. I guess the brainwashing by all his teachers from kindergarten on through University paid off! Why not just ignore the rock-throwers? If they persist, give them the finger? Say what you think, whatever it is. Self censorship is very easy to avoid, but a true crime against whatever humanity one has left, if committed.
Imagine if Mark Twain, Arthur Miller, John Steinbeck, Tennessee Williams, Aldous Huxley, David Mamet, Lewis Sinclair, Eugene O'Neill, J.D. Salinger, Neil Simon, Kurt Vonnegut, Thornton Wilder, Jack London, Lillian Hellman, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, or any of the great American novelists and playwrights of the 20th century, in order to have been published or produced, would have had to receive the State's label of approval certifying that their novels and plays were free of all cultural appropriation. Yet so many of our institutions that once lionized these icons are now incrementally corrupting minds and discouraging critical thinking.
Great article Mark. It was a sad day when you stopped writing for the Irish Times: it has gone full lunatic on the left-wing nonsense in the intervening period. Keep up the good work.
I am honoured to be commenting on your website Mark. Great to see many others who have joined your club as well.
As far as the latest leftist madness is concerned, the only way to deal with it is like them to cut off their money flow and watch them devour each other. This is going to take years or decades but in the end it is the only way.
Mark, as with everything you write, I could certainly not have said it better myself. :-)
Please carry on. The fight for free speech should be more hopeful in the U.S. thanks to our 1st Amendment and the way it has always been interpreted by the courts. (Some can still recall protecting ACTUAL Nazis' speeches and marches in the '50s and '60s.)
This is the fight on which everything else depends. Without broad acceptance of the expression of diverse views, there will be no diversity of views and no sociocultural change possible.
"The fight for free speech should be more hopeful in the U.S. thanks to our 1st Amendment..."
It should. But as Mark can attest, the 1st Amendment has amounted to little more than a urinal cake in the "sclerotic" toilet bowl of "justice" that is the DC Court of Appeals. I doubt that that court gets it right, but I am slightly more hopeful if and when it gets to SCOTUS. Of course, with vagabond "conservative jurists" like Anthony "Obergfell" Kennedy and John "Obamacare Is A Tax" Roberts, who can be sure?
Mark or Comments Section moderating staff.
I'm not complaining but I am asking for some info on the Comments section. Between what hours can we post. It is difficult to have a discussion when we have to wait. Most of us are spoiled and expect an instant appearance or a quick moderation. I understand Mark is expanding his website so I'm not demanding anything. But some info on best times to post etc. might be helpful. I don't where Mark finds the hours to present so many articles and so on but I appreciate it.
To me this is just another example of how the left operates. Liberals always set their goal posts a mile to the left of center because they know when "fair minded" conservatives come along seeking "common ground" they will still wind up a half-mile left of center. This "cultural appropriation" nonsense is just another set of goal posts:
"which like everything else these days started off as some obscure fetish only plonking humorless fringe Marxists cared about and then suddenly, in nothing flat, reared up like the shark in Jaws and started chewing up everyone on the beach."
You saw this played out very clearly two years ago with homosexual "marriage". Before the ink was even dry on Saint Anthony's Decree the left had already moved on to "transgenderism" (or whatever asinine term they are using today). They knew that by instantly moving the goal posts even further to the left, all the supposedly intelligent conservative sheep would suddenly see homosexual "marriage" as not so bad by comparison. immediately forgetting the fact that the decree had not one shred of constitutional justification.
You nailed it. They libs always tell us that "if they could just get this one issue settled" it would be the last great hurdle to inter-party comity. Republicans suck at this game.
I worry the Cultural Revolution is right around the next bend. This is dangerous stuff.
Free speech and "publishing whatever we want" are illusions but they sound nice and can be lucrative goals to promote. We can always fight to maintain some basic rights to express our never totally free opinions. But the best we can hope for is "nearly free speech." If we try too hard like Mark has done you could end up standing in front of a judge or a Human Rights Tribunal and other unpleasantries.
I was pleased to see that Mark Steyn has recently removed the following sentence from his "Note" to his Club members regarding what they can and can't say on his forum. "SteynOnline also reserves the right to edit comments for length, clarity and grammar" is no longer in the "Note" so that is a positive and admirable step. When I attempted to start a discussion about the rules in the "Note" a few days ago I was not given a joyous welcome by a few but to Mark's credit, he did not censor anything I wrote.
I don't understand why editor-in-chief Jonathan Kay is surprised that his "free(ha ha) speech" was being curtailed or controlled. The Walrus is a charitable non-profit "Walrus Foundation" magazine and is governed by a Board of Directors that receives guidance from their National Advisory Council. Their work is then evaluated by an Educational Review Committee. It is also funded by the Chawkers Foundation, the Government of Canada, the Ontario Arts Council, and Ontario Media Development Corporation."
Perhaps the naïve or thespian Kay's "contentious conversation about cultural appropriation in Canadian media and literature" was deemed to be an "unilluminatingly insulting generalization about various identity groups" (from Note) or their demands by someone in his long line of gov't and private contributors to the magazine. Just wondering.
I suppose I should stock up on taco shells now, before the appropriation committee police start patrolling the Mexican-food aisle of my local supermarket, forever depriving me of a favourite meal.
(I beg forgiveness if I have violated the "unilluminatingly insulting generalizations about various identity groups" rule, and plead ignorance if guilty, as I have no idea what it means.)
I made a comment with the same quote as you but it hasn't appeared yet. I wrote my comment before I read yours so I was not plagiarizing. Good point you make however. I was wondering about it a few days ago.
Maybe we should start our own magazine where we defend free speech and publish whatever we want. We could call it The Offensive. A good slogan would be "Good, go cry about it."
Cultural appropriation is yet another bad idea stemming from Critical Theory. What is worrying about these highly influential ideas is all they do is break the machine. There is no plan to rebuild what is critiqued, usually western civilization and its institutions, merely to take it apart and leave all the bits scattered and useless.
Michael Barone recently had some great ruminations on "cultural appropriation," and John Hinderaker quoted Barone at PowerLine: http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/05/michael-barone-lampoons-cultural-appropriation.php
"[W]hat if Italian-Americans started objecting to cultural appropriation? What if, for example, Italian-Americans began complaining that Americans of non-Italian descent are appropriating Italian culture by consuming pizza and pasta?
"The logical corollary would be to stamp out this hijacking of cultural heritage. In school lunchrooms, pupils would be required to show proof of Italian ancestry before getting a pizza slice. Supermarket checkout counters would require similar proof from putative pasta purchasers. Similarly for paninis at Panera Bread, chicken Parmesan at Olive Garden, etc.
"Fortunately, modern technology makes this possible. Schoolchildren and supermarket shoppers could display their Ancestry.com profiles on their smartphones as readily as they already brandish student IDs or credit cards. Others, however stereotypically Italianate in appearance, would have to be politely but firmly informed that their ancestry bars them from partaking of cuisine their ancestors had no part in concocting.
...
"Today's stern enforcers of the ukase against cultural appropriation will not, I suppose, be amused by this modest proposal. (Oops, I forgot that "ukase" is a Russian word.) They miss the irony that many of the folks who assure us that race is just a social construct, with no genetic significance, also insist that your genetic ancestry should determine what you can eat and wear, how you can exercise and style your hair."
==
That last paragraph reminds me of Ann Coulter's point that leftists deny the significance of IQ except when a cretin (as determined by IQ tests) is a candidate for the death penalty.
Jonathan Kay fell on his sword, thus committing yet another cultural appropriation no-no. Has this man no shame?
Mark, could you explain how anyone other than a descendant of the English can use the English language and not be charged with felonious cultural appropriation? There are few things more central to culture than language -- for years, the Quebecois language police have claimed that as self-evident Vérité.
Mark, I'll ask you the question you ask the Europeans about their countries' immigration policies: Where is the happy ending here for these organizations? Are there enough Lionel Shrivers to re-awaken them to the joys of freedom, or will they continue their downhill march into totalitarian groupthink?
What I don't understand is why Hal Niedzviecki and Jonathan Kay didn't go down guns blazing. Why apologise, and why resign? Make them fire you, and stand up to these bullying jackals by hurling contempt at them. They don't deserve apologies or qualifications -- the people who confessed at the show trials were shot anyway, so why grovel to these little Stalins.
I sure hope those non-Western fiction writers aren't using a computer to capture their prose. That would be a terribly offensive appropriation of our heritage. Carbon black on papyrus, maybe?
Why aren't people going bananas over Margaret Atwood's, "The Handmaid's Tale"? Obviously Atwood didn't live that life, or anything close to it.
Hillary-endorsing, never-Trump-and-his-racist-voters-suck-too elitist Bret Stephens also met the mob recently, over his invitation in the pages of the NYT to debate Climate Change.
Oh! Excuse me. My previous commentary was designed to point out the central challenge coming from the left, thus highlighting the deadly threat that must be confronted and overcome by the right. But...how?
Mark said "at the moment, on everything that matters - trade, war, health care - there's very little agreement over anything on the American right. But on the left it's different." Yes, it's different because the Left is united on "nothing beyond the state; nothing against the state; nothing outside the state". Why? Because their god is power over people, and the supreme institution for acquiring and using power over other people is the state.
Whatever else you can say for the left, its single-minded pursuit of power-through-government makes them a formidable political force...witness the mountains of corpses bequeathed to us by governments throughout history. (Note: This is not an argument for anarchy. Anarchism is a form of mass-surrender to statism)..
"The last time I was "literally shaking" was when I overdid it in the gas-sniffing round of the Aboriginal Cultural Appropriation Awards...".
That one is going to have me "literally shaking" with laughter for the whole rest of day!
I almost spit my coffee out when I read that.
BTW Mark, I think it is called "huffing". LOL
Hi Mark,
A bit off topic but last year you were doing research for a new book. Any news on that yet?
Great to have your columns back.